Reparations Already Occurred and Failed

The arguments against reparations for slavery and discrimination are overwhelming and one-sided. I’m referring to real-world reparations, not imaginary compensation for injustices impossible to identify and trace to people of today. Victims and oppressors can’t be identified. Race won’t do it. No one knows what justice is in this life or in this kind of situation. No one knows the extent of past and present oppression, the values involved or the remedies. No one knows how to relate today’s descendants to their long-dead oppressors. Most of today’s Americans have tenuous relations to such descendants, etc., etc., etc.

I don’t propose to list all the objections or to list all the quandaries reparations raise. I couldn’t do it if I tried. It’s safe to say that there are so many that the whole idea should be buried once and for all, yet the idea lives on in Democratic circles because it benefits Democrats.

Reparations are a boondoggle, a program sold as having value to achieve some goals but in reality having negative value for the American people as a whole. Democrats will attempt to “do” them (legislate them) if that boondoggle is the best one they can come up with that’s politically feasible within their party and to impose on taxpayers. Their goal will be to augment their own interests, not ours and not even of the racial constituencies whose injustices they purport to repair. Total skepticism is warranted about reparations as it should be warranted about the War on Poverty, the Great Society, the New Deal, the Green New Deal, the Fair Deal, and all such programs. They all perpetuate myths of improving American lives, society, social justice and other noble aims. They are all actually programs that are fraudulent, fraud-ridden, tawdry, inefficient, unjust, divisive, economically-retarded, wasteful, counter-productive and destructive. They are all communist, socialist and fascist in nature, combining bad and evil elements from all these totalitarian philosophies.

At this time, a number of Democrats want a commission to study reparations and make proposals. Commissions are always forerunners to actual legislation. The chances are zero that a commission will say “Forget the idea. There are no good ways to do reparations.” Anyone who says “Study the matter. Appoint a commission” is for reparations in some form.

Reparations matter because they affect votes, power and money. They are not about justice at all. That’s the wool being pulled over everyone’s eyes. Reparations, real-world reparations in today’s situation, are a political ruse. They are a fraud. They are a crime. They are a method to get votes, power and money. It’s an illusion to think otherwise.

Our country’s taxpayers of all sizes, shapes, stripes, races, and origins have already paid reparations. They’ve been paying them ever since the War on Poverty began, ever since 1964, ever since Medicare, ever since Food Stamps, ever since Medicaid, ever since public housing, and ever since a host of other federal programs. Estimates of the amounts of wealth transferred range from $15 to $22 trillion.

They weren’t called reparations. They were sold as erasing poverty. In time, their vast negative effects and failures became evident.

Any new programs sold as reparations will only have the same kinds of vastly negative effects as their past equivalents have already had.

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8:40 am on May 26, 2019